Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The Google Phone app could soon let you provide feedback for scam calls and let you add additional context.
- The Google Contacts app could also soon present a Lookup button previously only visible in the Phone app.
The Google Phone app works surprisingly well if you want to block phone numbers or just want to block spam calls in particular. Google recently added the ability to report calls as either spam or scam to the Phone app. When you long press on an entry in the call log and select Block or report, you can select from the two options for reporting as spam or scam and separately choose to block the phone number. When you report the number, it gets reported to Google without further context. A future update could improve this reporting process with a feedback mechanism for scam calls.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google Phone app v155.0.697690833-publicbeta includes clues suggesting that Google could implement a streamlined feedback mechanism for reporting more details about scam calls. In the future, when you report a call as a scam through the Phone app, Google will ask you for additional details and present you with a multi-select option list to choose your response. The questions and answers would likely include the following:
- What did the scammer ask for?
- Full name
- Download an app
- Electronic payment
- Full name
- Passwords
- Not applicable
- Something else
- What did the scammer pretend to be?
- FBI
- Friend
- IRS
- Police
- Social Security Administration
- Not applicable
- Something else
Selecting the “something else” option will open a popup where you can enter additional information. Google will review your response, which could possibly be used to alert people about the scam call number and its modus operandi.
We managed to activate the feature early, and this is what the scam reporting screens would look like:
In addition to scam call feedback, the Phone app now displays a new Lookup button for numbers that aren’t saved in your contact list. The button itself isn’t new, as it was previously visible in the Phone app. However, when you enter a contact details page in the Google Contacts app from the Google Phone app, you will see the button here, alongside a banner with the text “Contact info from Phone,” indicating that you are here from the Phone app.
The scam call feedback feature and the additional placement of the Lookup button are not currently live in the Google Phone and Google Contacts app, respectively. We’ll keep you updated when we learn more.
